Saturday Night Live (SNL) is the name of NBC's weekly late night one-and-a-half hour live comedy show, which has been on the air since 1975.

Each week, the show features a different celebrity guest host, and features a guest musical act (sometimes the guest host is the musical guest). The show consists of comedy sketches, a comedic news segment, spoofs of television commercials, and performances by the guest musical artist. Many of the sketches feature recurring characters or running gags, as well as impressions[?] of various celebrities.

The entire original cast, as well as producer Lorne Michaels, quit the show at the end of the fifth season because NBC refused to give them a requested hiatus. Jean Doumanian[?] took over the production of the show and hired a completely new cast for the 1980 season. The new show was plagued by problems from the start, and was deemed disastrously unfunny by both critics and the viewing audience. Symbolic of the problems faced by the show, cast member Charles Rocket[?] uttered the f-word (he actually said "frig", but it could have been interpreted as the f-word) during one sketch in early 1981; NBC, which had had enough, fired Doumanian, who was then replaced by Dick Ebersol[?]. Ebersol built a new cast around Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo[?], the only cast members he retained from the Doumanian era. Michaels later returned to the show.